Luke Bryan Reveals Sister’s True Cause of Death After Years of Rumors: ‘It Was Tragic Beyond Words’

Luke Bryan is finally setting the record straight about the tragic 2007 death of his sister, Kelly, after years of speculation that his family had kept details hidden.

“I’ve never really explained what happened to my sister,” Bryan revealed on a Tuesday, October 28, episode of CNN’s All There Is with Anderson Cooper. “There’s some misinformation out there… people think we’ve tried to cover it up.”

The country star, 49, revealed Kelly died at the age of 39 from sudden death syndrome, a rare condition that strikes without warning.

“There is a very, very small percentage of people that die for no reason in the world,” he said. “And it’s called sudden death syndrome and that’s essentially what they described my sister’s death as.”

“She was in her home doing her laundry,” he continued. “It was like, you know, somebody just turned the switch off on her and it was just tragic beyond words.”

In the days that followed her untimely death, Bryan remembered the agonizing uncertainty that followed: “We wanted to know what had happened… could there be a family history?”

Autopsy results were inconclusive, he revealed, though doctors noted a severe “orbital bone injury,” possibly from a fall.

The American Idol judge later adopted Kelly’s three children — Jordan, 29, Kris, 26, and Tilden, 23 — after her husband, Ben Cheshire, died of a heart attack in 2014. Bryan, and his wife, Caroline, are already a dad to sons Thomas, 17, and Tatum, 15. Still, despite the love they’ve welcomed into their hearts, it could never fill the void left behind from Kelly’s death.

“She really was everything in our lives,” he added.